by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
Everybody except a few leftist fanatics hates paying their income tax, and they are right to do so. As the great Murray Rothbard has taught us, taxation is theft, pure and simple. The government takes what is rightfully yours and spends it on whatever it wants. If this isn’t theft, what is?
Imagine that your neighbor has a lot of money that you would like for yourself. You hold him up at gunpoint and take his money. This is obviously theft. Why is it any different if the government does it? As Rothbard puts it, “For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance).
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Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”
Rothbard is well aware that some people, owing to years of indoctrination in “public” schools, will find this hard to accept. With his customary polemical brilliance, he challenges skeptics to find the difference: “It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist. It is true that State apologists maintain that taxation is ‘really’ voluntary; one simple but instructive refutation of this claim is to ponder what would happen if the government were to abolish taxation, and to confine itself to simple requests for voluntary contributions. Does anyone really believe that anything comparable to the current vast revenues of the State would continue to pour into its coffers? It is likely that even those theorists who claim that punishment never deters action would balk at such a claim. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter was correct when he acidly wrote that ‘the theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.’”
One way supporters of taxation try to show that it is different from theft is to argue that because we live in a democracy, “We the People” have voted to establish a government that can tax us. Nothing doing, says Rothbard. With passionate eloquence, he says: “It is also contended that, in democratic government, the act of voting makes the government and all its works and powers truly ‘voluntary.’ Again, there are many fallacies with this popular argument. In the first place, even if the majority of the public specifically endorsed each and every particular act of the government, this would simply be majority tyranny rather than a voluntary act undergone by every person in the country. Murder is murder, theft is theft, whether undertaken by one man against another, or by a group, or even by the majority of people within a given territorial area. The fact that a majority might support or condone an act of theft does not diminish the criminal essence of the act or its grave injustice. Otherwise, we would have to say, for example, that any Jews murdered by the democratically elected Nazi government were not murdered, but only ‘voluntarily committed suicide’—surely, the grotesque but logical implication of the ‘democracy as voluntary’ doctrine.”
